Goin' Country

Jessica Simpson is back—and on the verge of something big!

A month shy of 28, Jessica Simpson settles into a chair and cries, "I'm so old!" She says this with the happy despair that only a young woman experimenting with the idea of age, not the reality, can muster. She's just sailed into the New York City showroom for the Jessica Simpson Collection on a sweltering summer afternoon, flanked by her mom, Tina, and a bevy of tanned, middle-aged Texans, who have immediately fanned across the room, picking up Jessica's shoes and bags, oohing and ahhing as they roam: "These are cute!"

"The paparazzi were chasing us down Seventh Avenue," Jessica says, looking no worse for the pursuit. "They asked me if I was modeling lingerie. I said, `No!' Where do they get that?" Could it be the tiny white shorts she is sporting as she strides indomitably atop chunky-heeled sandals? She takes her ease at a glass-topped table in the spotless precincts of the showroom, which is suddenly as empty and cool as Antarctica (an Antarctica with lots of shoes) now that Tina and her friends have disappeared, leaving Jessica alone with me to moan about her age.

Her friend CaCee Cobb says that Jessica is always complaining about how old she is these days, which gets on her nerves now that CaCee has turned 30. "I just tell her, `Yeah, whatever,'" CaCee says. On the other hand, it's possible that the two and a half dark years that Jessica has suffered through since she broke up with her former husband, Nick Lachey, have made her feel ancient before her time. Or at least not a day under 28.

Up until she was about 25 or so, life couldn't have been going better for Jessica. The pop singer and "reality" star (reality—what a concept!) was sharing her life, giving it to her fans. She made music, too, but in this case, all she really had to do to be famous was live. Newlyweds, the MTV series chronicling her marriage to Nick, made her look guileless and cute and pretty damned goofy. America loved her for it, and she loved America back. "Jessica, I'm just like you," countless girls told her. And they were, she thought, except for one little thing: They didn't do everything in public. But for a long time, during her honeymoon—not with Nick; the one with the fans—that tiny difference didn't matter.

But Jessica's Nashville sojourn was not without a little trepidation. "Everybody wants to hate on my going into country," she says, "because I'm a pop star stomping into their territory." Dolly, who wrote and sang on a number called "Do You Know?" for the record, helped with her nerves. "She told me I was about to kick everybody's butt. Well, she used another word. She said that people should be scared." Dolly doesn't back down from her endorsement, asserting: "Jessica's songs are better than some of the biggest stars on the charts today."

Dolly even provided moral support for Jessica's love life. Not long ago, Dolly, who apparently reads the tabloids like everyone else, thought that Jessica and Tony Romo had broken up. She sent Jessica a letter along with four songs. "Dolly told Jessica that she could just listen to the songs over and over again," CaCee says. "She told her, `And if it's true that he's an asshole, I got one of those songs for you. And if it's true that you broke it off, I got one of those songs, too. I sent you one for every situation.'"

So far, however, the romance seems to be holding. In Romo, Jessica has rediscovered the kind of wholesome Christian guy she used to go out with when she was a virginal high school girl. The couple prays aloud together before meals and before going to bed. He takes her to church. Tony even reads blogs about her so that she doesn't have to. "It's the cutest thing," she says. "He'll say, `Jessica, 75 percent of the comments about your new single are favorable.'"

"Most of the guys I dated were captivated by my heart," Jessica says, "but they had different ways of trying to get to me. Tony understands me. He appreciates my talent. He's the first person I've spiritually connected with."

"Are you going to marry this Tony guy?" I ask.

"How will you ever know until they ask?" she says, laughing. "You can say yes. But what if they propose terribly? That moment for a woman—she should have her life flash in front of her eyes, and if her boyfriend is in it, she should say yes."

She's thinking about marriage, though. She lauds the marriage of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, which reminds her of her grandparents' marriage and the little sign they have above the door that says Home Is Where The Heart Is. "I finally understand this sign," Jessica says.

She recalls recently sitting at Maybelle Carter's piano at the Cash ranch near Nashville during the ELLE photo shoot, so moved that she was crying. She imagines that such an old-timey alliance might be waiting for her. She likes to think of sitting on the porch with her future husband, watching their four children playing in the grass of a really big yard. It could be in Laguna Beach, California, or Dallas—either one, she says.

"I'm a girl that loves to be in love," she says. "I love love!" she adds, delighted with herself for such a crisp formulation.

One thing's for sure. "I will never do pop again," she vows. We have come to that moment in the twenty-first century—and that time in our interview—when Jessica Simpson must finally admit it. "I don't know how to be that down!" And as inadvertent proof of this, she flashes what may or may not be hip-hop semaphore, or perhaps an attempt at a gang sign, but as filtered through the pure-as-spring-water mind of a Texas preacher's daughter. That is to say, she looks goofy as hell trying to imitate the hand gestures of someone who is down.

But a pretty blond looking goofy as hell remains a large part of Jessica's appeal. She disarms cynics like me by being no larger than exactly herself, by retailing a normality that is strangely charismatic, especially as magnified a million times by the alchemy of reality TV. She's Doris Day with a twang.

Her renouncement of pop picks up speed and hilarity, as if a heavy burden is being lifted from her white girl's heart. "I'm just not rhythmic like that. I might shake my booty, but I'll be off the beat. It's my sister, Ashlee, who got all the rhythm in the family." Although sitting in a chair, she does her best to shake her Baptist booty. The chair squeaks arrhythmically.

To prove it, she pushes the button of a CD player that a showroom employee has placed on the glass-topped table. Out blasts "Come on Over," the first single from the record. Jessica belts the song with a saucy, girlish swagger, her voice a thousand times larger than its owner, as if the voice and Jessica have arrived on Earth from different solar systems. "I need you now, I need you bad!" she pleads to some slowpoke of a boy. (Maybe she's waiting for him to finish praying.) This is suburban country, as shiny and metallic as a new SUV, but it perfectly fulfills CaCee's summary of her friend's aims. "She wanted to make a record that was Shania Twain meets Faith Hill with a little Sheryl Crow thrown in."

Jessica bobs her head and sings along with her own song, just like someone driving, bopping along to the radio in a bubble of speed and noise. Her lips jut, her eyes close in private rapture.

The interviewer sitting a foot away has disappeared. The whole tabloid-driven world has vanished. For a few minutes in a showroom high above Manhattan, her song is the only world she has to live in. For far too long, she'd been stuck face-forward in the dirt, as she says, pitying herself. But not anymore.

CaCee says that at the moment, Jessica "has been through the worst and risen above it. Her attitude now is: `I don't give a shit.'" Somewhat more elegantly—maybe she really has changed—Jessica calls her life now a "homecoming." "Music is my salvation. It saved me from the world getting the best of me. The wall I built through my divorce has been broken."

When the song ends, Jessica opens her eyes and whoops: "HEEEEEEEWHOOOOOO! I'm back!" Her laughter fills the room.

But when, in 2005, her marriage went south, as many early marriages will, everything else began to unravel too. She'd never been on her own before. She'd gone from a father to a husband when many girls her age were sharing apartments with their best friends. She'd started dating Nick when she was 18 and he was 25, had been married to him since she was 22. She had no idea of who she was without him.

In December 2005, less than a month after breaking up with Nick, she went to his hometown of Cincinnati to give a Christmas concert. Backstage, she froze. "I told CaCee, I can't go out there," Jessica says. "People are gonna hate me. I've never been onstage without Nick in the wings."

CaCee grabbed her face and said, "You're going out there. You have got to sing."

In tears, Jessica said, "I can't. I don't have anything to sing about."

"You're singing Christmas songs," CaCee said, pushing her toward the stage. "Think back to when you were a kid."

So Jessica went onto the stage and, as she says, "I just fell to my knees and started bawling, and everyone in the audience was bawling, so I sang and cried and it was like a prayer for peace."

Not world peace. Jessica peace. World peace could maybe wait until her life smoothed out. Actual reality was a bitch!

Then came what CaCee refers to as "the incident." It occurred on December 3, 2006, a black-tie night at the Kennedy Center in Washington during which Dolly Parton was honored. "I was singing `9 to 5' and I choked and forgot the words in front of the president and in front of Dolly Parton, who's like the president to me," Jessica says. "And the last time I sang in front of the president, I had messed up the lyrics to `God Bless America.' So it's a kind of thing I have with George W." She giggles, not entirely rueful. George W. and Jessica—two Texans with faulty memories whose recent plans for world domination have gone somewhat astray.

"Anyway, I broke down and said I'm sorry in front of the whole audience. My dad was there. I looked him in the face and said, `I will never sing again.'" The sort of thing that might have once seemed cute—forgetting lyrics—was beginning to look like an extended breakdown.

She apologized to Dolly, who said, "Oh, hush, I screwed up the words all the time." She told Jessica, "I will always love you." (Even now, the words thrill her—"Oh my God! Dolly Parton told me she would always love me!") Dolly later wrote Jessica, telling her: Don't believe this stuff they write about you. If you only knew half of what people have written about me. Keep being yourself. That's who people love.

Keep being yourself. The advice would have been good if only Jessica had had the slightest idea of who she was. Growing up a sheltered preacher's daughter in Richardson, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, had not prepared her for the vagaries of celebrity. One day you're in, the next you're out, as one luminary of the disposable moment puts it. Of course, this means one thing when applied to fashion, quite another in regard to human beings, even pop stars.

Somehow, in the blink of a divorce, Jessica had gone from feeling like America's darling to America's most wanted. "So many people want to bring me down, and I can't wait to prove them wrong," she says.

"Who wants to bring you down?" I ask.

"Just people in general," she says. "If they believe what they read about me, they automatically persecute and torment me." Just this week, for instance, the tabloids are accusing Jessica's father and manager, Joe Simpson, of running not just his daughter's career, but her love life, too. Those weren't tears of joy he was crying when she married Nick, the tabloids suggest. And Joe's the one who brought Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, her boyfriend of seven months, into her life and who won't leave Romo alone.

"That's ludicrous," Jessica replies in a moment of real heat. "He just wants me to be happy. Our whole family gets beaten, but that just brings us closer. So people are really doing themselves a disservice."

As her career foundered—the TV newlywed was no longer wed, and the pop singer wouldn't sing—her romantic life slid out of control as well, like a house in the Hollywood Hills carried away in a mud slide. The girl who'd waited until marriage to bestow her virginity was now cycling through men faster than tornadoes spin through the Midwest. The musician John Mayer. The singer Adam Levine of Maroon 5. There were rumors of dalliances with the comedian Dane Cook, the actor Jude Law, and Johnny Knoxville of MTV's Jackass.

"I was going through a lot of pain," she says. "I didn't try anything to change my life other than dating different types of guys and conforming to their worlds. I thought I had to be artsier, more intellectual."

While going out with Mayer, for instance, she started snapping photographs of clouds and rainbows. "John believed in the Jessica Simpson that's within," she says deliberately, a diplomat of failed romance. "He cherished our love. He helped make me the woman I am today. John is going to be an amazing man for someone, but I know that I was supposed to be with someone else."

A brief attempt at therapy went astray when Jessica worried that the analyst would leak her secrets to the press. "I wasn't ready to be open yet," she says. Her image may have been built upon transparency, but even MTV had only seemed to show everything in Newlyweds; the most heated moments between her and Nick had ended up on the cutting-room floor, courtesy of her father, executive producer.

The dark years of Jessica Simpson also apparently included abuse. She says that her forthcoming album will include a song called "Remember That" by the Nashville songwriters Rachel Proctor and Victoria Banks that she hopes will deliver a message to abused women. "It doesn't matter how he hurts you," she sings, "With his hands or with his words/ You don't deserve it/ It ain't worth it/ Take your heart and run."

"I had to record that," Jessica says. "There's nothing on my album you're gonna hear that I don't relate to or that I haven't experienced. Because the only way I know how to sing is from life experience."

"Are you thinking of anybody in particular when you sing that?" I ask.

"That is a personal question that I do want to keep to myself," she says. "But I know that I sing it with experience."

She stops to ponder her response. She finally says, "I don't want to talk about it, but I have definitely experienced abuse in a way that I would tell people to take their heart and run."

Her 2006 album, recorded for Epic and entitled A Public Affair, offered no release from the grimness of those days. "It was `Dance, have fun, I'm happy, ha, ha, can't you tell?'" she says. "I couldn't promote that record because people could tell I was lying. And I'm a horrible liar. So I said nothing, and the record went under." Lambasted by reviewers, the album sold poorly, a far cry from 2003's In This Skin, which had gone quadruple platinum.

As she approached her late twenties, it would have been understandable had Jessica peeked into the future and seen herself as a has-been-to-be, a surefire candidate for a VH1 documentary to be called I Remember 2003. In 10 years, she could look forward to the Jessica Simpson Nostalgia Tour of American Malls. Welcome, Paramus! Rock 'n' roll never forgets, but dance pop has a hard time remembering what it had for breakfast.

Jessica no longer wanted to sing in public, she had come to disdain pop music, and she couldn't find a boyfriend who would accept her for who she was. And the tabloids shadowed every brokenhearted move, feasting on it all.

The upshot of all this private and public flagellation, the singer says, was that "I built a wall and said, `No, no, no!'" And a Jessica Simpson who said, "No, no, no," was a Jessica who no longer recognized herself. The goof had been forced into hiding. "When I went through my phase of being guarded," she says, "people were like, `Are you kidding? Who do you think you are?'"

Floundering, hoping that acting offered her a way out (she still hopes for a role in a Woody Allen movie and adores what Diane Keaton "did with her hands" in Annie Hall, she went off to play Daisy Duke in the Dukes of Hazzard, a part that really required her to stretch her acting skills by donning skimpy cutoffs and a hot pink bikini. On the set, she met that grizzled Texan bard, Willie Nelson, Uncle Jesse Duke in the movie. "She fell in love with Willie," CaCee says. The pair hung out on his bus, where they would sing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." Willie played her Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Patsy Cline, and Bobbie Gentry. He also informed her that the original title to his song "Crazy," made famous by Cline, was "Stupid." He sang Jessica a few bars: "Stupid, stupid for you." Jessica fell for it.

"I was pulling her pretty little leg," Willie says. "I didn't know that she believed me. That makes it even better." He coughs up a gravelly laugh. "Jessica's a beautiful person, but she's a little naive in a couple of areas," he says.

But Jessica knows that it's her fate in life to be the butt of jokes. "You gotta tell me these things!" she says about Willie Nelson's ruse. "If the opportunity is there—stick foot in mouth—that's Jessica." Then she brightens. "I can tell you everything you want to know about buffalo wings," she says.

"Go ahead," I say.

"They're from Buffalo," she says, pleased with herself. "The city!"

The thing about Willie Nelson, that Texas puller of pretty legs, is that he confirmed for Jessica her growing sense that she had strayed too far from her roots as a Texas girl who grew up singing in the church. She could still recall how when she was 12, she joined the older girls on a Baptist retreat belting "Amazing Grace" and she floated out of her body when she heard her own voice, and from that moment on, her purpose in life was set. "I was going to use my voice to change this world," she says.

She had tried to sing country on her third album, much to the label's dismay; the project was deep-sixed. But after hanging out on Willie Nelson's bus, she had decided that from here on out, come hell or high water, she was going country. "Don't forget, she's coming from a gospel background," Willie says. "And that ties easily into country music." The country audience that Jessica now intended to woo is open-minded, he says, "as long as they see that something is sincere."

Slowly, Jessica's life began to resume an earlier shape, ruled by the values and style of her childhood. Toward the end of last year, she called her old friend, CaCee, who'd worked in A&R for Columbia Records and as Jessica's personal assistant; she'd also played a large role on Newlyweds. When Jessica asked her to come with her to Nashville and help get together a country album, CaCee hesitated. "I said I didn't want to," she says, "because if the record doesn't do well, we won't be friends. And Jessica said, `It's probably going to fail, so let's just do it.'"

If for most of the past decade, Jessica's career models had been the likes of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera, those nubile dance queens with hormones gone wild, she now set her compass by the needlepoint wisdom of Dolly Parton, another Southerner with chemically enhanced hair who had happily confessed to Jessica, "If you really knew, I ain't blond!" Their bond had deepened since Jessica had whiffed on Dolly's lyrics that disastrous night at the Kennedy Center.

"I see myself in Dolly," Jessica says. "She's everything I aspire to be in an artist. She has the fun, silly, kitschy vibe. She knew who she was and allowed the world to adapt. It's a foreshadowing for me." Jessica and CaCee spent four months in Nashville this past winter, working with many of the top songwriters on Music Row. They en-listed respected producers Brett James and John Shanks to put it all together. In her musical element for the first time in her career, Jessica ended up cowriting all but three of the songs on the album.

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